


Isn't Sunburst

by SilentWaves



Category: Barbie - All Media Types, Barbie Fairytopia (Movies)
Genre: Character studies, F/F, Gen, listen I've been in love with Sunburst for over 10 years and this is what happened, the relationship tag is minor but Very Much Present
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:34:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28340976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentWaves/pseuds/SilentWaves
Summary: Laverna's impression of Sunburst may have been enough to trick the other fairies, but it doesn't mean that none of them suspected something was wrong.There's a threat of winter, marked by the stolen sun.
Relationships: Elina/Sunburst (Barbie Fairytopia), minor Elina/Sunburst (Barbie Fairytopia)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	Isn't Sunburst

**Author's Note:**

> back on my bullshit with more barbie movie lesbians... anyways Sunburst was my gay awakening so here you go queen I love you

It all started with a healing chant and a missed fairy ball. It ended with the threat of ten years of bitter winter.

* * *

Lumina wakes with a start. She’s been told all her life that moon fairies were gifted with knowledge of the future. _A gift, a gift — accept it with all your heart_ , but she’s been anything but grateful as of late. 

Ever since arriving at the Crystal Palace, her nights have been filled with blizzards and endless cold. There are too many futures, too many paths, but misfortune lies somewhere on each of them. She would never reject her magic — her wings — but misses the days when she could shut her eyes and see warm meadows and smiling fairies. She misses spring, and summer, and fall. 

_Oh, it’ll happen. Can’t say when. Sorry about that!_ She always says to people looking for insight into the future. How she wishes it could be false, that she could be powerful enough to see upcoming disasters as anything more concrete than shadows in fog and monsters in nightmares.

She sees Elina during training, and _sees_ a blast like magic — like really, really powerful magic. Like magic with intent to kill. Like forbidden magic, lost to this time of peace and prosperity. 

She sees Amethyst, and she _sees_ her Guardian in deep slumber. He’s not dead, thank the Enchantress, but he’s most certainly gone when he’s needed the most. _When would this come to pass?_ she asks herself, _and why isn’t she there to help?_

Where is her place, in this cursed future that she sees?

Too many of her visions are coming true already, playing out with a twisted sense of déja-vu, pieces slotting horribly against one another and Lumina can’t help but fear that she really will see snowfall for the first time, much too soon. She would try harder to shut out the visions, but what she’s really trying to do is find out what started this all.

The closest she gets is a green cage, blurry and distorted like no vision Lumina’s ever had before — as though underwater. Like a grotesque egg, trapping the sun inside, refusing to give her light to the world. There are two of these eggs, and she’s not sure which ones terrifies her more. One that traps the sun, and one that traps the light. 

A certain colour is becoming familiar in Lumina’s visions — putrid, rot-green surrounding her and turning a dream into a nightmare. Green like decay, and mould, and a warning. 

She would soon begin to associate this colour with Laverna, but the vision containing that information has not yet appeared in Lumina’s mind.

* * *

There’s a whisper going through the river. _That young lady, I hope she’s alright,_ and Linden is worried. 

_Her power comes from fire and light, we don’t see her sort down here unless they’re already dead,_ he heard that morning. Dead? Now who could be dead in the realm so close to her majesty’s palace? The Enchantress is merciful, and the her magic is healing. 

‘Fire and light’? The only fairy around here whose magic is made of fire and light would be — no. He can’t say they’d ever be friends, but he can acknowledge that she’s strong. Possibly one of the strongest out of all the apprentices, after Elina. He just saw her last evening, albeit with a cold compress on her forehead and woozy ramblings on her tongue. Regardless, she’s certainly not underwater, and she’s certainly could not be mistaken for dead. 

They must be from upstream, far away from here, Linden thinks. They _must_ be.

* * *

The First Blush of Spring knew right away that Fairytopia would be experiencing ten years of bitter winter. 

It refuses to open completely. Not to this orange light. Something is wrong with it, and the blush will not open until it is made right. Where is the usual glow? The proud, warm one — like the sun. The fairy usually in charge has so much experience, and he always performed such a delectable luminescence. 

Where was sun now? Every other glow has changed, but every other glow was still fundamentally pure. 

The orange energy wasn’t light. It was darkness and anger, masquerading as something else. The creator of that energy was performing the dance with disrespect, and the creator of that energy would not be contributing to the First Blush of Spring’s bloom.

No, it would stay shut and asleep for ten more years, or until a _real_ fairy of the light comes to coax open its petals.

* * *

The Enchantress knows that she’s only one half of a whole. A heart, missing the brain. 

The brain that was meant to be her sister, with her cunningly sharp wit and boundless innovations. Two sisters, meant to rule over Fairytopia _together_ , but even the heart knows not to dream too much. 

She tried to convince Laverna over the years, sending too many messages to count and being baited into a trap not nearly enough times for the Enchantress to give up on her dear sister. 

“A softhearted kingdom does not need a sharp-minded ruler,” Laverna said as yet another poisoned tea cup touched the Enchantress’ lips. “The only thing I require is conquest, not _pity_ ,” she spits the word out with anger, her expression morphing into glee as the Enchantress falls into a poisoned sleep at her table.

It’s the least the Enchantress can do now, to stand on this platform with the emptiness of a missing half stretching out around her. She can stand here, at the very least, and watch to ensure the First Blush of Spring will bloom and bring spring again to Laverna, however far she may be.

Maybe she’ll see the flowers and be reminded of home. Maybe she’ll come to like rainbows again, come springtime.

But that’s neither here nor there. What’s _here_ are the lovely fairies who have stepped up in their Guardians’ place. What’s _there_ is her equally lovely sister, hidden somewhere beneath layers of jealousy and spite.

The Enchantress’ attention is drawn to one fairy in particular when she sees her yawn. She sees her perform the ceremony with boredom and she knows that no apprentice of Tourmaline would ever be caught dead yawning in the Enchantress’ presence (not that she minded. It would be awfully refreshing, really, if it wasn’t more alarming than anything else).

The Enchantress sees this fairy with the charming amber hair and sharp sparks at her fingertips, and she recalls her early school days. 

She recalls workbooks, thinking that she’ll _never_ understand magic theory and applications of ancient alchemy. She recalls her sister from the next seat over, yawning as she finished her own booklet with a bored expression gracing her face. The Enchantress was always so proud of her younger sister, succeeding where her elder failed. 

“I’m done already,” Laverna had said, in the unintentionally-superior tone that only a child prodigy could have. “I’ll help you figure it out so we can go play in the gardens, yeah?”

The Enchantress sees a yawn, and she hopes that this bright young student doesn’t end up like Laverna. Their expressions already look too similar, and the Enchantress doesn’t want to see anyone with so much hatred in their eyes.

She especially doesn’t want this young student’s family to see those eyes, and know that they’ve been rejected for some greater, darker purpose; that’s the worst pain of all.

* * *

Elina was the first to suspect. 

Who else could be the first? Who else had Sunburst scoffed at even a fifth as many times? Elina suspected, and it was a mistake to let that suspicion go unchecked.

_What’s a little personality change compared to the release of the most dangerous fairy in all the land?_ She had thought. She did not think, that maybe the two issues were one and the same. 

Later, when Sunburst asked how Elina knew it was Laverna and not her, she said it was because Laverna was nice to her. But that wasn’t all it was. Laverna was darkness and unjustified anger. She wasn’t just _nice_ , she was _plain_ too.

Laverna was all _wrong, wrong, wrong._

She didn’t have the wrinkle between Sunburst’s brows, didn’t have the arrogant half-smirk that cut across her lips — the sharpest blade is also the most beautiful — didn’t have the edge in her voice that left cuts without pain.

Laverna didn’t make Elina’s cheeks flush in a mix of anger and — and something else. Didn’t make Elina question what nobody else ever did: Where _would_ Elina be, if it hadn’t been for the first waves of disaster? Who would she be, without Laverna’s thirst for her sister’s blood and her hunger for her sister’s crown?

She never _needed_ to question it before Sunburst came into her life (technically, Elina was the one who walked into hers). She never wanted to. Would she still have those pixies following her around “eating all their broccolina so they could be _just like her_ ”, if she hadn’t been the only flightless fairy around at that time?

She knows the answer. She knows it just as well as Sunburst, or Laverna, or anyone who would spare it a moment of consideration.

Releasing Laverna from her amphibian prison had been an accident, yes, but her own arrogance was no such thing.

Like a ray of light through Peony’s petals, Sunburst had snapped Elina back to reality with a downward turn of her rosy lips and an arrogant tilt of her head. The world isn’t going to keep giving her opportunities to save it, and it’s time Elina carves a place for herself outside of her connection to Laverna.

Sunburst woke her up, and now it’s Elina’s turn to do the same.

“Laverna would have kept her in water!” Elina declares. _Where else could that brilliant spark be stifled?_

* * *

Sunburst remembers drowning — a heaviness in her limbs, a drowsiness and fatigue as soon as her skin brushed water. Water filling her lungs, then a gel-like energy.

_So Laverna is gracious enough to keep me alive,_ Sunburst thought as her vision faded to black. _Another soft heart, hidden behind hard layers._ She doesn’t stay awake long enough to consider the implications behind that thought.

Sunburst remembers waking up to a tug on her arm, a realization that she isn’t breathing — _hasn’t_ really been breathing for a while now. She remembers blinking, sluggish. A magically-induced sleep meant one with no dreams and no nightmares. She had been floating in her mind while still in her body, a sensation like resting on water that she just learned and does not seek to experience again.

Sunburst remembers all too well waking up to the same pink that she mocked and hated, now a pink that’s saving her from this watery cage. 

She swam up and coughed for what felt like ages — her throat raw from experiencing real air again, her lungs sore from the lack of use and full of water that she’s trying to evaporate with her magic. 

“Laverna,” Sunburst says with a scratchy voice. She hates that she sounds vulnerable, hates that she _feels_ even more so with the water still vaporizing off her skin and Elina’s warm hand on her shoulder. “Is she…?”

Elina confirms her worst suspicions, and they fly to the Crystal Palace as fast as Sunburst’s waterlogged wings can flap.

And there’s a sense of _security_ , as Elina supports Sunburst’s weight on her shoulder, the determined crease in her eyebrow and a hard set of her eyes. _Laverna won’t get away with only a curse this time,_ they seemed to say. 

Sunburst smiles despite herself, despite knowing that Elina could see it if she only turns her head. She smiles despite her own prideful thoughts of ‘I can fly on my own’ and ‘I don’t need _your_ help, of all people,’ because suddenly Elina really looked like the Savior she was playing herself up to be.

Now _this_ is a hero. Hard set eyes surrounded by an aura of tenderness. Of compassion. A hero should capture light and emit it into the darkness, and Sunburst is willing to give Elina all the light she can make.

Her wings are dry by the time they reach the crystal palace, but she doesn’t let go of Elina’s arm. 

She just smiles at her with a look that says everything that needs to be told. A look that’s unmistakably _Sunburst_.

**Author's Note:**

> phew ok so I wasn't kidding about writing more Barbie fanfiction eventually,, I just cannot guarantee when the next one will be. ~~That being said, I have been thinking A Lot about Merliah/Kylie lately 👀👀~~
> 
> Anyways, feel free to leave a message in the comments or on my [Tumblr](https://voicelesswaves.tumblr.com/)! I will pretty much always be down to talk about old barbie movies.


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